Out of Cheese

I'm off to Philadelphia for

I'm off to Philadelphia for the weekend, so blogging (and email, and any other communication) will be sporadic.

Scott Rosenberg gets the story

Scott Rosenberg gets the story wrong regarding Apple's use of the DMCA to prevent the fine folks at Other World Computing from providing some software for third-party DVD drives on the Mac. The issue as I understand it is that OWC was patching Apple's iDVD application, which would fall under the copyright protection portions of the DMCA.

Whether Apple was right to do this is another matter entirely, but the portion of the law that allows them to do so has nothing explicit to do with copying movies, and it is definitely allowing Apple to protect its intellectual property. The DMCA could not be used to prevent OWC from producing its own movie-making software that worked with third-party DVD drives, for example, but it can allow Apple to prevent OWC from modifying Apple's software.

Larry Lessig notes that the

Larry Lessig notes that the Constitution explicitly states that copyright protection should be time-limited. The debate is therefore not a question of whether to protect (apologies to Richard Stallman), but rather how long is appropriate. That's what Eldred v. Ashcroft is all about -- has Congress overstepped the meaning of the Constitution's "for limited Times" intent through its unceasing extension of copyright protection?

Lessig's piece mentions a Rutgers Computer Technology and Law Review article from 1996, "Economically Efficient Treatment of Computer Software: Reverse Engineering, Protection, and Disclosure". I'd love to read that. I'm just not sure how I'd go about getting a copy.

I'm an uncle (again)! My

I'm an uncle (again)! My first nephew was born last night in a suburb of Paris. Mom, Dad, Sheina, and baby are all doing well as far as I know.